Crate and Barrel Reviews

Pros

Crate & Barrel searches the globe for merchandise that offers great design, remarkable quality, and timeless style. The company therefore attracts employees from all walks of life, and fosters excellence with stupendous comradery and frequent training. Crate & Barrel is very inclusive and encourages collaboration. It values the opinions of its workers and customers with the utmost respect. It is also very proud of its Illinois heritage and loyal partnership with its vendors around the world. Lastly they offer great innovation and trend-setting style that is simply iconic.

Advice to Management

Keep up the enthusiasm, comradery, and exceptional leadership!

Pros

Benefits are good, casual work environment, flexible schedule (at least in my department), building is lovely with lots of perks (free fitness center, shuttle to Metra train, cafe, etc.)

Pros

Good camaraderie amongst sales staff, learned a lot of product knowledge

Pros

Challenging, Fun, and Positive Company Culture

Pros

Amazing company culture, strong brand and executive leadership.

Advice to Management

Thank you for leading with passion and ensuring our company culture remains positive.

Pros

Big brand that most people know
Interesting work
Associate discount for products
Some smart people
Cafeteria in building

Advice to Management

Don’t be so cheap. You get what you pay for.

Pros

Great customers, great coworkers, all around warm and inviting company.

Pros

Good Salary, Room for growth

Advice to Management

High level management needs to start to consider the pressure getting placed at the lower level management who are running and supporting the warehouses/stores. They need to fight more for our medical benefits since they have gone down hill. Hospital co-pays are now $200. Deductible went up to $3K for a family. The amount of hours that are required to work to get jobs done are well over any allotted 40 hours and it is more the norm to work 50-60 hour weeks (almost 2 months of unpaid salary hours) with no knowledge, recognition, or compensation. This is becoming a constant expectation and it is harming the employees moral as well as the balance between work and family life. They bring people in with enticing offers of higher salaries, 401K, vacation and sick time as well as their supposed annual bonuses. The bonuses are inconsistent and not based on employees work, extreme hours worked over the course of a year, or the revenue brought in by the company as a whole.

They also fail to tell people that while the concept of having vacation time is nice, it is extremely hard to use and the sick time that can not be carried over is always lost due to the inability to actually take off when sick. Vacation time is generous when you are approved to take it. They never use to have a cap out but in the last year they went to a carryover limit of 320 hours. More recently in July they went down to 160 our cap that needed to get down by the first week of November. 4 months is not enough time to get down an entire month of vacation time. Employees were not offered a pay out or comp time. When time is getting requested it is getting denied due to the busy time period. Personally time was proposed in order to get down to the allotted carry over and it has been denied. To lose almost 3 weeks vacation time is wrong. I worked hard over my years at this company and sacrificed time with my family to ensure that the company was running and I was doing my part. To be disregarded when it came time to trying to take my vacation time (which I was forced to do since we had to reduce it) is highly insulting. I understood the need to reduce the amount of carryover hours, I just believe that it was handled poorly on HR's part and there should have been a plan laid out that showed the employees that there time mattered to the company as well as ensuring that ALL employees were able to reduce their time down to the carryover amount. In addition as soon as you reach the November deadline, you are then blacked out from taking any vacation time till after the holiday season which is roughly 3-4 pay cycles of additionally accrued time.

Previous companies have laid out plans over 3 years for such drastic changes in vacation time carryover and each year reduced the amount of time by a week. Maybe 3 years is a long time, but 4 months is unacceptable and unrealistic. Why give employees time if you are not going to allow them to take it and it is only going back into the company's bank. This should really be revisited soon before other employees begin to explore options at other companies where employees are valued. Crate and Barrel could be a good company to work for if they showed an appreciation and common decency towards their employees.

Pros

Full time benefits, employee discount, brand recognition

Advice to Management

Current management continues to lose quality people in all departments due to poor interpersonal skills. You are creating an increasingly unhappy and disheartened staff. Stop the negative approach and employee bashing. Promote from within, follow through on promises, staff your departments, and support your employees looking to advance or transfer!

Pros

If you work around the right people it can make the hours go by. The discounts are pretty good and like anything else it was a great learning experience! Most employees are hard working and dedicated